V E R S E and I M A G E

Nearly half, we’re told, downed by wind,

wrenched from river-flooded ground.

 +++ Clogging streets, parks, schoolyards,

blocking our hiking trails. Our town is dank

as a worn graveyard, branches and brambles

 +++ strewn among marble stones.

 +++ So what to do with the haunt

of these crippled trees? My muse would say

go to the woods, hike the trail anyway.

And I will. But before lacing my boots,

let me honor what we’ve learned of nature,

 +++ how in mystery

trees speak to one another – give support

 +++ and shade, share water and sun.

And like old friends, mourn when one dies.

Let me rub my fingers into the wound

 +++ of this tulip poplars’s bark,

nod to the beetles and lichen who thrive.

Smell the sweet air of pine sap.

 +++ Scrunch my body

over broken bones of oaks and willows,

cling to the dead the way I’d cling

as a kid to our sugar maple

 +++ next to Daddy’s tomato patch.

Limbs holding me safe,

 +++ a flutter of breeze through leaves

always whispering my name.

Let me linger here in the trees I”ve known,

the ones now gone, the ones

 +++ still upright and grieving.

from Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer. Redhawk Publications, Hickory NC; © 2025

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It was cold enough to frost last night but I hear music outside my bedroom window and raise the sash. A sparrow is calling, perched on a branch just a few feet from the house. He swivels his head west-south-east and at each turn chirps a metallic almost musical tink. He means business. He is not just any little brown bird – he’s a White-Throated Sparrow, migrated here from Canada to spend the winter. And his perch is not just any tree – it’s a native dogwood. It holds onto color, its coppery leaves, while the tuliptree and maple are already browning in the road. This tree holds onto life when so many of its kinfolk have been taken down by blight.

Tink, tink, tink. I am here. Brassy foliage and scarlet berries. I am here. We are here for each other.

Poets who survived hurricane Helene mourn their trees. The poems in Had I a Dove bear witness – trees uprooted, splintered, tumbled down mountainsides, tangled in rivers. Trees crushing houses and blocking roads, trees wiped from entire ridgelines, and with every fresh breeze our own reborn fear of trees falling. We being a species which can grasp large numbers, we try to calculate. How many trees destroyed by wind and flood? Millions? Dozens of millions? It becomes unimaginable. At the loss of even one tree, the heart suffers. That big hickory that shaded the garden. The righteous oak that lifted and held the kids’ tire swing. The dogwood where sparrows perched.

Hurricane Hugo roared through Charleston in 1989 and felled thousand-year old cypresses in the blackwater swamps, then stomped on up the Appalachian chain to leave behind downed trees all the way to Ohio. Near our home a hundred year old oak blocked Flat Rock Ridge trail where it winds from Basin Cove up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. An anonymous Park Service volunteer with a huge chain saw cleared the trail, and into the face of that massive stump he carved “Hugo 9-21-89.” I have paid homage every time I hike past, until a couple of years ago I had to stop and cast about to find the stump. Rot and lichen and a thick beard of moss had cloaked the inscription. Overhead, the canopy had closed as fellow trees shouldered their way in. In the midst of grief and loss, we hold onto life.

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the morning that yowling she-wolf,

Helene stormed up from Florida,

sank blood-stained fangs into Appalachia,

her torrential mad-drool rain,

drowning wide river valleys,

and all those skinny little hollers.

From a kitchen window I watched

her lay into a neighboring ridge, her super-charged

breath knocking down magnificent oaks,

colossal hickories, and hundreds of tall pines

which dominoed one by one by one.

She left nothing standing in the upper hillside grove.

The next day, after that noisy bitch moved on,

I heard an immense tree fall somewhere

close by. There was a crack,

a ghostly groan, a swoosh of leaves,

then, as it met the ground, a tremendous bellow.

And I whispered a prayer for the passing.

from Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer. Redhawk Publications, Hickory NC; © 2025

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Barbara Conrad has lived in North Carolina all her life and in Asheville since COVID. She edits Waiting for Soup, an anthology created by her writing group with houseless folks.

Suzette Clark Bradshaw lives in western North Carolina, writes and sculpts, and is employed by her county to manage Helene recovery projects and FEMA grants.

Molly Bolton lives in Foscoe, North Carolina, and upholds the spiritual practice of collective liberation with weekly posts at enfleshed.com.

Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, an anthology collected and edited by Hilda Downer, includes a preface by Joseph Bathanti. More than 80 poets, voices as various and deep as those wild mountain ridges and hollers, share the night that hurricane Helene’s “thousand year” flooding and gales devastated the mountain counties of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. They share the days and weeks and now months that have come after, the scars and healing. Available from Redhawk Publications at Catawba Valley Community College Press in Hickory, NC.

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still blooms, the same

spot as last year

at the crumbling edge

of the driveway

in the seam

of march and April

under the body

of a fallen elder oak

each flower coming up

wrapped around

its stem like a windless

white flag.

they say

among the rubble

there will be dancing –

beautiful people

in ancient lands

tending fires

while they are hunted

ghosts unsurprised

by the power of greed

to route bombs towards

children, a hurricane

to the mountains. my sister

had to come get me

through maze of

washed-out roads &

Here

I am, still alive

same spot as last year

bumming a cigarette outside

the todd community square dance

just to watch smoke rise

from the creaky porch

past the blown-open riverbank

to the cold white stars.

from Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer. Redhawk Publications, Hickory NC; © 2025

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